So I like, whenever I visit schools and festivals I like to talk a little bit about the pens that I use because most kids don’t use these types of pens. They’re kind of old-fashioned because it’s, pen and ink is typically means that you have a pen that doesn’t have ink inside of it like a more commonly used pen today. You have to dip into a bottle of ink and that ink for me, there’s all different types of inks you can buy but I use a waterproof ink.
Because when I color the pictures, I paint over the drawings with watercolor paints. So yeah, I use different pens that have different points in them that you can take in and out of the sort of holder and those are called nibs, so there’s different nibs that have different flexibilities and some can draw you know very thin lines that can open up to become very thick lines and some that aren’t as flexible and there’s some that aren’t as sharp so they don’t catch in the paper surface.
And there’s another type of pen I use, it’s basically like a, it’s what we’d call a bamboo pen or reed pen and it’s a sharpened piece of bamboo that you dip into ink. The bamboo pen is a very thick line usually so I use that for pictures that are more gestural or I know that that’s going to be a looser drawing and they have to be sort of larger in scale, the images, the pictures. So for me it’s really about just finding the right tool because my line, the lines that I draw for me it’s very important that that line be, have a character to it.
There’s some artists that really love a very clear, clean, consistent line and again for me that’s the opposite of how I want my lines to look, I want them to be very rough and scratchy and inconsistent and so the types of pens that I chose are the ones that are going to create those types of lines.